New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell looks at why major changes in our society so often happen suddenly and unexpectedly. Ideas, behavior, messages, and products, he argues, often spread like outbreaks of infectious disease. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a few fare-beaters and graffiti artists fuel a subway crime wave, or a satisfied customer fill the empty tables of a new restaurant. These are social epidemics,...

This book uncovers the hidden rules that shape the balance between the weak and the mighty and the powerful and the dispossessed. In it the author challenges how we think about obstacles and disadvantages, offering a new interpretation of what it means to be discriminated against, or cope with a disability, or lose a parent, or attend a mediocre school, or suffer from any number of other apparent setbacks. He begins with the real story of what happened...

"When Jessica Farris signs up for a psychology study conducted by the mysterious Dr. Shields, she thinks all she'll have to do is answer a few questions, collect her money, and leave. But as the questions grow more and more intense and invasive and the sessions become outings where Jess is told what to wear and how to act, she begins to feel as though Dr. Shields may know what she's thinking...and what she's hiding."--

"Can reading a book make you more rational? Can it explain why there seems to be so much irrationality in the world, including, let's be honest, in each of us? These are the goals of Steven Pinker's follow-up to Enlightenment Now (Bill Gates's "new favorite book of all time"). Humans today are often portrayed as cavemen out of time, poised to react to a lion in the grass with a suite of biases, blind spots, fallacies, and illusions. But this, Pinker...

"From psychotherapist Katherine Morgan Schafler, an invitation to every "recovering perfectionist" to challenge the way they look at perfectionism, and the way they look at themselves. We've been looking at perfectionism all wrong. As psychotherapist and former on-site therapist at Google Katherine Morgan Schafler argues in The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control, you don't have to stop being a perfectionist to be healthy. For women who are sick...

Lizette Henry, possessing unusual detection skills but struggling with a memory disorder, accepts help from the mysterious and seductive Xavier--a stranger who triggers disturbing images of an unspeakable crime of which Lizette may or may not be the perpetrator.

"The story in book five of the We Say What's Okay series helps children to realize that no one is entitled to another's body, which includes things like hair and wheelchairs. Children will be empowered to say no (and it doesn't have to be polite)"-- "A story that helps teach young children that it's okay to say no. Feeling empowered to say no is a key foundation of consent. We Can Say No builds children's social and emotional skills and helps teach...

From the moment we enter school as children, we are made to feel as if our brains are fixed entities, capable of learning certain things and not others, influenced exclusively by genetics. This notion follows us into adulthood, where we tend to simply accept these established beliefs about our skillsets (i.e. that we don't have "a math brain" or that we aren't "the creative type"). These damaging--and as new science has revealed, false--assumptions...

"A contemporary story that explores one question: What baggage are you carrying? When three people take the wrong suitcase from baggage claim, their lives change forever. In this modern-day parable about the burdens that weigh us down, David Rawlings issues an inspiring invitation to lighten the load"--